Will Rockwell said:
New pilot here, I've had only one day of flying but have a question. On my third short flight, the Vision tilted sideways on the pavement and did not respond to an engine power-off command. As I was doing my pre-flight I noticed the satellite count changing from 5 to 6. What happens if that 6th satellite connection is lost and there are only 5, could that be the cause of the strange behavior? Should I have pulled the S1 switch to the down position?
Problem is you took off your Phantom too soon to begin with. You should wait with your Phantom on the ground till it maintains a stable lock of 6 or more satellites for no less than 30 seconds though I will wait as long as a couple of minutes depending on my environment. If I take off in my back yard GPS has a harder time locking properly so it can take a couple of minutes to maintain a sold GPS lock of 6+. When I fly at the park however satellite lock is much faster and I can take off sooner with less concern.
If you don't wish to wait too long on the ground before take off. At the very least make sure your Phantom did a "Home Lock" before take off which is indicated by the tail lights quick flashing green, followed by a solid green. You can immediately take off if you really want to, but if you're only at the minimum of 6 satellites when you do there is always the chance you will drop down to 5 again.
Flying with less than 6 satellites means the following will happen. 1) If you hit the fail safe either by flying beyond controller reception, or by shutting it off. Your Phantom will auto land where it is and NOT fly back to the home position it took off from. 2) The Phantom will behave more as if it were in Attitiude mode, minus the more responsive controls (attitude mode has much higher gains set on the stick control vs GPS mode. What this means is your Phantom can be easily blown away from you and our of range should a gust of wind hit you. If you get pulled out of controller range and still have less than 6 satelites, refer to point number 1.
Info regarding "Attitude" mode. Attitude mode is not available out of the box. Firstly, for a new flyer I would leave things as is. If you become more experienced then you can go to the DJI assistant software and first enable "Naza" mode which you get to by clicking "Phantom 2" on the top right of the application. Naza mode will enable Attitude mode. By default Attitude mode will be available by moving your S1 switch to the middle or lower positions. Alternatively you can customize the bottom position of the S1 switch to instead enable the "Fail Safe" mode (without having to turn off the controller) or "Manual" mode (absolutely do NOT fly in Manual mode, you will most likely crash, badly) Be careful if flying in attitude mode. First, if flying and you let off of the controls your Phantom will keep moving in the direction you were flying, it will not quickly stop on it's own as in GPS mode. It also takes less movement to move your Phantom quickly. Aggressive forward movement will drive your Phantom straight into the ground as it's not using GPS to hold your altitude position. You can also fly a lot faster in Atti mode, up to 50mph versus around 35mph or so in GPS mode so you can easily fly out of visual or transmitter range if not careful.
With Naza mode enabled you can also turn on IOC "Intelligent Orientation Control" under advanced. Which gives you the following two modes. S2 switch up, off, middle, Course Lock, S2 switch down, Home Lock. With course lock on, lets say you take off with your Phantom 2 Vison directly in front of you and GPS locked. regardless of which direction you point the nose, moving the Forward Back Left Right controls will always do just that, and not get reversed or mixed up, like if you had the nose of your Phantom pointing at you, or sideways. Home Lock works when your Phantom is more than 33 feet away from the "Home Locked" position. Keeping in mind you must have good satellite lock. When you switch to home lock, regardless of which way the front of the Phantom is facing, or where it is in the sky. Pulling back on the right control stick (assuming you didn't change your controller from mode 2 to mode 1) will always fly the Phantom back in a straight line towards the marked "Home" position.
I hope that helped, and was not too much information for you starting out. Please read the top three threads for some more helpful information for new pilots. And especially as a new flyer try not to fly too far out of your comfort zone. it's also a good idea as a new flyer to keep your initial few flights in a very open grassy field so you have less chance of crashing into something, or someone.